This week I decided to look up Tycho Brahe’s nose. After all, it is the title of our blog. And as you’d expect when looking up someone’s nose, you come across a fair amount of useless gunk. But keep poking around for long enough and those itchy fingers start uncovering some really fascinating nuggets.
The first thing everyone knows about Brahe – even before they know what he looks like or even how to pronounce his name – is that he had a gold prosthetic nose. Now I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as rude. It’s also mistaken, incidentally, but more than anything else it’s rude. So here’s a picture of Tycho Brahe (Brah, Bra-hay or Bra-hee, depending on how wrong you mind being) for you to look at while you think about just how rude you’ve been.
Forget the nose – why doesn’t anyone remember those moustaches?!
Brahe’s original nose (not shown in the above) was cut off to spite his face by a fellow Dane named Manderup Parsberg while the two were students at the University of Rostock in Northern Germany. Many have claimed the duel was inspired by a mathematical disagreement, which is a cute story, but Tycho seems like the sort of person who would have challenged you to a duel if you looked the wrong way at his moose (don’t worry, we’ll come back to the moose).